Ownership Is The Floor

I spend an unreasonable amount of time on presentations.

Not on building them. On making them mine. Half the decks I present started life somewhere else. Corporate templates, a colleague’s version, slides that came down from a regional team with the message already baked in. That is normal in a company of any size and I have no problem with it. What I cannot do is walk into a room and read someone else’s slides out loud.

So I rework them. I cut things that do not fit how I talk. I rewrite headlines in my own words even when the original was perfectly fine, because I need to be able to say them without stumbling. Then I rehearse. Not in front of a mirror, I am Finnish and there are limits, but in my head. On the way to the office. Lunch breaks. I play the whole thing through and listen for the places where the story stalls, where the transition does not work, where I would lose the room. Usually I find something I dislike. Then I fix them and run it again.

By the time I stand up, I know what is coming next and I know why it is there. If someone interrupts on slide four with a hard question, I can answer it, because I have already argued with slide four myself.

Why? My name is on the meeting invite and my face is at the front of the room, and if the argument falls apart under pressure, nobody is going to blame the person who built the template.

Which is why the Bill Oliver YouTube clip made me wince instead of laugh.

Oliver is a Progressive Conservative member of the New Brunswick Legislative Assembly. Last month he gave a speech about the province’s advocate offices. Partway through, without breaking stride, he read out the sentence “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

That is not a speech. That is a chatbot introducing a draft. He read it into the official record and kept going. Nobody in the chamber reacted. The clip only surfaced weeks later, when someone on Reddit spotted what an entire legislature had sat through without noticing.

The internet has done the ridicule already and I am not going to add to it. The man made a mistake in public and he is paying for it in public. What interests me is not Oliver. It is the chain of people around that speech, all of whom agreed without discussing it that reading the thing before it was delivered was optional. Somewhere in that chain, whoever drafted the words and whoever loaded the prompter, nobody caught it either. Oliver didn’t catch it. Whether he never read the draft or simply stopped engaging with it no longer matters. By the time he stood at the lectern, he wasn’t actively owning the words coming out of his mouth.

Ghostwriting is not the scandal here. Ghostwriting is ancient. Presidents have had speechwriters for a century, ministers have had staff drafting their remarks for as long as there have been ministers with staff, and nobody has ever seriously argued that a public figure must personally compose every word they say.

The standard was always something else. The standard was that you read it. You sat with the draft, crossed things out, put things back, said it aloud in your office to hear where it sounded wrong. You went into the room knowing what was in there because you had fought with it first. The words came from someone else’s pen and became yours through the work of preparing to deliver them.

That step is what disappeared. Not the outsourcing of writing. The outsourcing of reading, and underneath the reading, the preparation it always stood for. The work of sitting with something until it becomes yours.

I wrote about a version of this in the first post I put on this blog, Proxies for Machines. The argument was that the real danger of AI in professional work is not that the output is wrong. It is that the output becomes an input to something else, including to a human being, and nobody in the chain ever actually looks at it. Oliver is that pattern with a face on it. He was the human in the loop. The loop went straight through him and out the other side. Functionally he was an API call between a chatbot and Hansard.

So whose words were those?

Under the old standard the answer was easy. Delivery implied review. You would not have said it if you had not first agreed to say it, so the words were yours regardless of who typed them. That assumption is now carrying weight it cannot hold. Oliver never agreed to say what he said. He had not prepared it. His mouth moved and the words went into the permanent record of a legislature with his name attached.

AI did not take his judgment. He put it down. Nobody made him do that, and the tool did exactly what it was built to do. And the failure is utterly ordinary, because most of us who work with these tools have done a smaller version of it recently. The email skimmed and sent. The summary forwarded without checking the source. The draft approved because the sentences were smooth and reading it properly would have cost ten minutes. Oliver did it with a camera pointed at him. That is the only real difference between him and the rest of us.

Every company I have worked for demands ownership from its leaders. Not authorship, ownership. If you present a number, you answer for the number. If your team ships something broken, it is yours. You cannot stand in front of a board and say the deck came from strategy so the mistake is theirs. That would end a career, and it should, because the entire reason we put someone in charge is that a specific human being is accountable for what comes out of their mouth.

We demand this from a regional sales director. We are apparently no longer demanding it from elected representatives.

I think that is the wrong way round. The person who speaks in a legislature is not a channel for content produced elsewhere. They were chosen, by people, to think about things on those people’s behalf and then say what they concluded. Delegating the writing has always been fine. Delegating the preparation is a different act, because preparation is where the words stop being someone else’s and start being something you would stand behind. Pretending otherwise because the tooling made it convenient is not a technology problem. It is a standards problem, and standards only exist for as long as somebody insists on them.

So insist. If a company can fire an executive for reading out numbers they never checked, voters can expect a legislator to have read the speech before giving it. That is not a high bar. It used to be the floor. It still ought to be.